Few have noticed the disappearance of certain stock theatrical genres. Basic British farce and the gothic thriller, for instance, seem to have gone the way of all flesh. But the belated import of James Sherman's play, first seen at Chicago's Victory Gardens Theatre in the early 1990s, reminds us that there is still life in the kind of American-Jewish comedy of which Neil Simon is the master.

Sherman's play hinges on a somewhat dubious premise: in order to appease her traditional Jewish parents, the heroine, Sarah, hires an escort-agency beau for a Shabbat dinner. Given that Sarah is a bright teacher and already has a boyfriend, admittedly gentile, you would have thought she might have foreseen the ensuing complications. Sure enough, the situation spirals into comic absurdity when Sarah discovers her hired hand, Bob, is not even Jewish, but then she and the family start to fall for this highly personable impersonator.

The play's best feature is its use of Jewish family rituals. We get a potted, faintly satirised version of the Seder meal in which one of the participants cries, "Let all who are needy come to our Passover feast", at which point he opens a door and all-too-swiftly shuts it. Sherman's play also sanely argues that you cannot sacrifice your life to parental expectations. But its treatment of character is inconsistent. At one moment, Bob is a hapless innocent who, when asked if he is Sephardic, replies: "No, I'm Jewish"; at the next, he is a sharp operator who uses his experience of playing Fiddler on the Roof to propose a Jewish toast. I also miss the prodigal inventiveness of those old Kaufman and Hart comedies that would introduce eccentric minor characters in the final act.

But Susie McKenna, who directs the peerless Hackney pantomimes, keeps the plot boiling. Laura Pulver as the duplicitous Sarah and Adam Rayner as the stand-in lover also have the charm and good looks to satisfy the play's romantic tendencies, and Jack Chissick and Sue Kelvin keep the orthodox Jewish parents just this side of caricature.

It all makes for a pleasantly old-fashioned play that taught me two things: one, given that I saw it at a well-attended Sunday matinee, is that it is madness most theatres remain shut at that time; the other is that stock forms are worth preserving, if only to provide a matrix that more experimental dramatists can smash to smithereens.